So how many of you know that Slashdot is up for sale? It's been on the firehose and elsewhere on the web all morning, but, as near as I can tell, not on the Slashdot front page? Is Slashdot ownership not news for nerds or stuff that matters anymore?

Oh, and way to go USA on finally getting around to answering that petition... Nice to see such a quick, open, and transparent response to the citizenry. At least this one is honest.

Editors fail to post any of several different submissions about the sale of Slashdot and Sourceforge to the front page of Slashdot (of which this is one of several that reached "red" in the firehose). Perhaps it's not considered news for nerds or stuff that matters? Not after three years of Dice management?

Harvest heat from the microwave background and then push it back out at the wavelength and direction of one's choice. Might not be the most bountiful source of energy in the universe, but it's mostly everywhere ;)

Verizon's program will track your physical location, network use, and just about any other information they can get while watching what happens to/with your smartphone and share it with anyone willing to pay for it for marketing, sales, etc... reasons. Always on, only the one large opt in with no incremental no opt out, and definitely no aggregation/anonymization.

I'm generally willing to answer survey questions for a fraction of the revenue. So Google Opinion Rewards and Nielsen's TV watching logs are generally ok with me. Market research which doesn't split the value of my opinions with me will generally (but not always) get short shrift. (Note that value doesn't have to be monetary, I'll often give opinions when I think there's a chance of influencing the item in a direction beneficial to me). Passive tracking options which don't give me an option to selectively participate/abstain are DOA as far as I'm concerned (like Verizon Rewards).

I agree. Which OU had control of the space? Where's the dirt? Is even there a single decent paparazzo left in science reporting?

I give kudos to the selection of the "special projects" building though*. Nothing like a remote corner of campus with sloped earthwork embankments around all the lab windows for doing something like this. Do you realize how much of a success this indicates for NIST's culture of safety (which they've been working hard on ever since that little Pu oops in Boulder)? Even their alleged illicit activity takes safety into consideration (although the explosion indicates the potential perp. missed something in the hazard analysis - but hey, what do you expect from criminals).

*For those that don't know, that was a politically clever rename of the hazards building, similar to how they also came up with the Center for Neutron Research name.

I'm sure it wouldn't be the first time an author called a journal editor (or reviewer) nasty names based on received comments.

Hmm... I wonder if the AC would have said the same thing if shortscruffydave had called out a syntax error in C; you know, nothing code breaking, just sloppy editing.

The counter here, is the same in every other threat/hazard matrix. You define an index value - like the ANSI Z.10 relative hazard index and then use that as a quantification when you define an acceptable risk for any given task.

Stainless Steel Rat movies would be horrid. At least half their value was the way that the writing style was an extension of the protagonist's persona. You'd never get that on film. You might be able to pull each story off in a fast paced forty-five minute episode - make a mini-series out of the books, but you'd still lose a lot. If they want content for the big screen - Vorkosigan is the way to go! Much more of Bujold would translate to film.

While it's not cannon anymore (i.e. from a book), stating it as a distance was a demonstration of the ship's power such that it could fly so close to a black hole cluster that it could do the traditional smuggling run in a distance of less than twelve parsecs.

The Mos Eisley Cantina... Duh!

Yeah - but a geosynchronous orbit at 2 meters is really hard ;)

I have a dream of when my children, and my children's children, can read/listen/watch recordings of extremely important public cultural events over the internet and not be committing copyright infringement.

Sorry - knee jerk response to the dream phrase made it as far as the keyboard.

It'd be a nice feature - or even to have a work/home bubbles (you too Amazon). Bubbling is the term that duckduckgo.com uses to describe anticipated search intent. They don't bubble and tend to be decent with their results. I'll often switch to them if Google (or Amazon) seems stuck in a paradigm of what they think I want.